Venice Token (VVV) climbed above $27 to a record on Wednesday, after a credit fight between OpenAI and an NYU mathematician revived interest in private AI inference.
Key Points:
- Venice Token set a record above $27 on Wednesday, roughly doubling in a week on heavy volume.
- A public dispute over an OpenAI math proof pushed questions about chatbot data privacy into wide circulation.
- Venice runs open-source models with no accounts or content filters, and says it passed a $100 million annualized revenue run rate in August.
VVV Rally Follows OpenAI Credit Dispute
NYU mathematics professor Tristan Buckmaster detailed three proofs on Tuesday, work he completed with Anthropic mathematician Levent Alpöge. Hours later, OpenAI published a full proof of the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of seven Millennium Prize problems carrying a $1 million award. The company said an unreleased internal model produced the result.
Buckmaster wrote that a parallel OpenAI team built on his approach before it became public, and that researcher Sébastien Bubeck asked him to strip Alpöge's credit because Alpöge works for a rival lab. He also flagged his own heavy use of Codex, which OpenAI may train on unless users opt out.
OpenAI denied seeing the pair's work, though it noted it cannot rule out that de-identified usage data helped improve its models.
Chief executive Sam Altman said the two approaches look different now that both are public. Roughly 10,000 agents ran for 88 hours, at a cost OpenAI put in the millions.
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Erik Voorhees Pitches Private Inference
Erik Voorhees, who founded ShapeShift, built Venice on the opposite premise. Prompts stay with the user rather than sitting on a company's servers, and the platform runs open-source models with no content filtering and no account requirement, a pitch it has made since January 2025.
The token works as an access key rather than a governance chip, since staking VVV entitles holders to a share of daily API inference capacity. A second token, DIEM, is minted by locking staked VVV and pays $1 daily in credit. Part of platform revenue buys VVV on the open market and burns it.
VVV traded near $27 on Wednesday, up roughly 52% over 24 hours, lifting its market value close to $1.3 billion. Reported gains varied by venue, and some trackers put the daily move nearer 41% on volume above $300 million.
VVV Price Swings Track Venice Revenue
The token sat near $14.50 in mid-August, when Voorhees said revenue had crossed a $100 million annualized run rate, up from about $70 million a month earlier.
Venice raised $65 million at a $1 billion valuation in July, its first outside round, and reported more than three million active users at the time. Annual emissions stepped down to 2.5 million tokens on Sept. 1, with a further cut to two million scheduled for October.
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